Hanging Tomato
Submitted by Sarah D. Bunting on April 9, 2008 – 2:29 PM40 Comments
No, not me chilling on the monkey bars — this gadget. Does anyone have any experience with this contraption? Because I could fit it on my fire escape and kick it homegrown this summer, but I’m wondering if anyone’s tried it, or knows anyone else who has. Google results split the difference between “this is a good solution for people with little to no square footage” and disgustedly captioned photos of tomatoes the size of Advil.
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Tags: city living home 'n' garden
My aunt is the queen of infomercial buying, and this lovely invention showed up on my doorstep about two weeks ago.
It holds true to the claim that it’s easy to use and fits in small spaces, but we’ll see how big and beautimous the ‘maters are.
I’ll letcha know if I end up with “30 lbs of tomatoes” or a funky mess hanging outside of my window.
Cool idea… but wouldn’t the ripe tomatoes fall to the ground from their weight?
This one: http://www.gardeners.com/Gardener+s+Revolution+Planter /PotsPlanters_HangingPlanters,37-000,default,cp.html – is from a great gardening site/catalog. Their stuff is excellent. If you have the room, the tomato success kit is all it claims to be — I get great results with almost no effort. Until the local squirrels find it.
Just FYI – plants on the fire escape are a violation of fire code and you can get fined. I think it is rare, but I have received a warning before.
Heh. My Christopher wouldn’t let me start tomato seeds because he wants one of these gadgets. I’m looking forward to the comments on this one.
Wurd on the street (or rather, at my book club) is that these’ns are promising. I think you should go for it.
@Rebecca — thanks for the tip. I do leave a path for egress, and after three years I suspect anyone who were going to call it in would have done so already.
What’s funny is that if you advertised normal, grow-in-regular-dirt tomato plants, you’d get the same mix of people being like, “THESE ARE AWESOME!” and people saying, “My tomatoes look like RAT DOOTS.” My grandpa had a real talent for growing tomatoes, but many other people I have known have…not, really.
No personal experience here, but my father-in-law grows tomatoes upside-down every year. Works fine for him. I’m not sure if he uses this particular contraption.
My friend’s mom loves this thing…but she can grow anything, I swear. Not only a green thumb, but green fingers & toes as well!
Tomatoes hold onto the vine a lot more than you’d think – they only fall off when they’re over-ripe.
In my experience, tomatoes need a LOT of space for their roots. The cans shown don’t look big enough to support a plant that would give you 30lb of tomatoes unless you were some kind of master gardener.
A Roma might work though, or a cherry or pear tomato, and then you can eat tomatoes right off the vine (I bet you wouldn’t get many grubs on a fire escape :D). There are so many delicious varieties of tomato, you can’t go wrong.
I imagine this works as well as any TV gadget — all right, but not as well as you would have liked. At least it’s not “4 easy payments of $99.99.” Just make sure you get a ton of sunlight & are in a position to water them as much as they need.
I have done the same thing without ordering the kit. I used a regular mop bucket with handle (ice cream pail works too). Then cut a 4 to 5 inch dia. hole in the bottom. Buy tomato plants and potting soil at your favorite home improvement store. Put the root end of the plant through the bucket hole (plant hanging out the bottom). Fill with soil and hang bucket by handle on your deck, cloths pole, etc…The size of the tomatos depends on the variety you plant.
Word on the sunlight factor. I think bright, direct sunlight is much more responsible for good tomatoes than whatever you grow them in…might have a tough time with that on a fire escape.
Hubby grows tomatoes in pots every year, and has tremendous luck with them. He doesn’t do the upside-down thing, but I’ve seen them, and they looked healthy.
I imagine it’s like any garden project – how green is your thumb?
I got my mom this one for her birthday last January and she loves it. The tomatoes were goodly sized, she didn’t have to get down on her knees, she could plant herbs on the top, and, best of all, the cats couldn’t use the tomato patch as a litter pan.
Those look a little iffy to me — I’ve always heard the root size is generally the same size as the plant, so the pictures look unrealistic with the plants outsizing the root things.
My next door neighbor has had amazing results with tomatoes in regular hanging pots, like the ones they sell petunias in. Cherry tomatoes and smaller regular tomatoes (no one pound+ tomatoes or anything, but respectable).
5 gallon Home Depot bucket + bag o’dirt + one tomato plant = lots of success on my apartment balcony.
I put a big crack across the whole bottom of the bucket trying to cut a hole in it (those buckets are tough), but it didn’t leak too much dirt as a result.
As for those those mega-plants on the website? 10 pounds of Miracle Grow, and you could get tomatoes from a bucket of styrofoam peanuts, if you know what I’m saying.
If it’s anything like the AeroGarden, which I have, you’ve got a 50-50 shot. My thyme, mint, and parsley were pretty OK, the dill and cilantro never appeared, but the basil was ROCKIN’. I think it’s probably worth a shot. Give us a full report–if it works for you, I’m IN.
My dad made his own version of this – it worked great for about a week. Then the windstorm hit and ripped the vine to shreds. Make sure you have appropriate wind shelter, and it should be awesome.
Cheryl and Laura beat me to it. You don’t so much need one of those as… a bucket with a hole in it.
I’ve never tried upside down growing but I imagine success has more to do with the variety of tomato plant, the viability of the seeds you get, and how well suited your area is to your particular plants than with that gadget, or even growing upside down versus right side up (drainage and soil quality being equal).
Get a ‘mater variety that’s not going to clutch its proverbial pearls at city pollution and variable sunlight and go nuts. Here’s another “How to” for upside down tomatoes: http://tinyurl.com/2xkknb
As soon as I have a balcony/fire escape “terrace” I’ll be doing the same!
WOO! http://www.tomatofest.com/
Also, http://tinyurl.com/68v694
Sweet. Want!!
Karen – Would you say the areogarden is worth the money? It’s expensive, if they only offered herbs I wouldn’t even consider it, but… cherry tomatoes! salad greens! *dazzly eyes*…
“Because the Topsy Turvyâ„¢ is upside down, water and nutrients pour directly from the root to the fruit…”
Oh, please… millions of years of evolution/design of God/whatever, plants are optimized to move water and nutrients where they have to go! They don’t need anymore help with that than we need to hang upside down to get the blood from our feet to our heads.
OK, speaking as a gardener with a deck that’s about fire-escape proportions: I don’t have one, but for ten bucks each? Go for it! Tomatoes want to hang all over anyway, so they’ll probably love growing like that. I’ve found that the rule for potted plants on a deck is DRAINAGE. Make sure water can’t pool in there and rot the roots, then water daily or more because that small amount of dirt will dry out faster than you think. Get a yummy variety, apply Miracle-Gro per package directions, add lots of sun, and start dreaming of tomato-y goodness.
We tried this for the first time last year—they did OK, but not nearly as well as the ones planted in the ground. (We also made our own contraption, as some other posters have said.) Our best theory on why they didn’t do as well is that I neglected to fertilize them after the initial planting and the nutrients ran out with the rest of the water. We’re going to try it again this year, but I’ll fertilize with half-strength Miracle-Gro every other week this time. I’m leery of overdoing it and burning the roots.
Good luck, and please post pictures of your progress!
Word to those trying to grow tomatoes on the back porches. SQUIRRELS. Greedy little buggers used to make off with one of my lovely Roma tomatoes just when it was about to get ripe. So if you’ve got climb-y, enterprising beasties about, I’d invest in a system of invisible electric fencing of some kind. Unless you want 30 lb of lovely red fruits, each with a rodent-sized bite out of it.
A.
My dad grew tomatoes this way when I was a kid. The key is giving the tomatoes sunlight on at least three sides, and not having them too close to a wall. And yeah, plant food. The Romas seemed to like this style of growing better than the other varieties we tried.
Oh, dear lord. Nothing productive to say other than I am crying with laughter over here from “RAT DOOTS!” I can’t even look at the monitor right now without bursting out all over again. I’ve got the hiccups. Oh, me.
Can you not just buy a bucket and plant the plants the normal way up, then hang it up by the handle? Much cheaper and easier – I’m not convinced about growing them upside down, plants don’t normally do that for a reason!
My tomato plants are dying as we speak. I have the hands of gardening death. Wonder if they sell that contraption in the UK…
While living in Montreal I discovered this fantastic rooftop garden project – their website offers all kinds of cool ways to grow food in small city spaces like balconies and railings. They were growing lettuce in PVC pipes and winter squash in rubbermaid containers – SO COOL. Their website (http://rooftopgardens.ca) includes a page with designs for some of their many crazy containers: http://rooftopgardens.ca/?q=image/tid/66
I’ve looked at these things with so much envy. I have plenty of space to garden, but I’ve given up because of the trio of deer that like to hang out under the streetlight in front of my house. Anytime anything got even remotely ripe they’d eat it. I can’t even grow zucchini because of them. They do leave the bitty herb garden by the front door alone so I can grow fresh tarragon, thyme and oregano, but my growing season is too short and cold for basil… boo.
Keight–about the AeroGarden: it’s kind of a tough call. You’re right: it’s PRICEY. Do I really buy that much basil? Plus, it just keeps growing and growing and growing (basil is a WEED, man), and if I’m not using it every night then I’ve got the same problem as with store-bought basil: I have to cut it back, and then toss it, since basil doesn’t preserve well.
Plus, it’s tricky in a small NYC kitchen because you have to keep raising the canopy as your plants grow and at some point it will no longer fit under the hanging cabinets. And then you have to move it to the front of your counter and you can’t open that cabinet any more.
But you know what? There’s just nothing like being able to pick up some tomatoes at the market and come home and whip up a nice tomato-basil sald for dinner. It’s just right there. And your kitchen smells wonderful. And the grow-lights act like a night-light in the late evening, or when you come home to an otherwise dark apartment in the winter. You can’t put a price on that, can you?
So, yeah, I think it’s worth it. In fact, I’ve been thinking about how to swing a second one, so I could grow greens as well as herbs.
“RAT DOOTS” is making me giggle, too!
Seconding everyone who has said it – just buy a hanging pot or bucket or something that you don’t mind putting a hole in the bottom. I tried this & that part of it worked fine. All I’m going to say about the part you want (the tomaters) it is that a) I don’t have a green thumb & b) my yard doesn’t get enough sun, so I got as many tomatoes from this as from my regular plantings (er, which was very few). So I can’t really speak to the effectiveness. But I can speak to my cheapness!
RAT DOOTS
RAT DOOTS
RAT DOOTS
RAT DOOTS
RAT DOOTS
RAT DOOTS
RAT DOOTS
I will be laughing at this all day long.
@Athenae: I’d be worried about squirrels, but I’d worry about Tomato-Stealin’ Jack more. Utopian Socialists take bigger bites than squirrels.
Please don’t use MiracleGro. Chemical fertilizers are a major source of non-point source pollution. Might I recommend something along the lines of TerraCycle? Their product is environmentally friendly, and they even package it in repurposed plastic soda bottles. (I promise I don’t work for them…I don’t even really do much gardening…I have a black thumb.)
Rat? Doots.
I was also going to post a link to the Rooftop Garden Project here in Montreal, but someone beat me to it. Excellent. And the detailed guide that they produced a couple of years ago has been translated into English now, so that’s a really good resource.
I second (or third, or whatever it is by now) all the people that have said you don’t need a fancy contraption to grow tomatoes or greens or herbs or what-have-you in, you really just need a bucket or rubbermaid container or something, decent soil and good drainage. Fishmeal, coffee grounds and compost are all great non-chemical fertilizer solutions, too. Without having too much space, just our small balcony, we grow enough greens, tomatoes, green beans and bok choy to keep us in salads for the whole summer. If it weren’t for the never-ending war with the squirrels… it would be totally trouble-free.
@walrus: Probably an obvious idea you’ve already had, but what about chicken wire? We have raccoons, squirrels and whatnot, and I’d expect they can figure out a way through/under/around just about anything, but I’d like to make it as difficult as possible.
Count me among the bucket users; we’ve got four buckets hanging on our balcony right now, with about 7 tomatoes growing. We’ve had a lot of success, and we grow jalapenos and anaheim chilies on the top of the buckets. It looks cuter than it sounds, a bucket doesn’t look as bucket-y with plants on top. Don’t waste money on the gimmicks, try the bucket first and then decide if you want to go high-brow next season.
@Jaybird: Chicken wire works… kind of… They do still manage to get through it if something inside looks tasty enough to be worth the effort, but I think that it discourages the lazy drive-by bites that can be just as annoying as straight-up theft of tomatoes and other items.